Both their beings were prepared for violence; the least display of impatience, the most ordinary contrariety increased immoderately in their disordered organism, and all at once, took the form of brutality.

A mere nothing raised a storm that lasted until the morrow.

A plate too warm, an open window, a denial, a simple observation, sufficed to drive them into regular fits of madness.
In the course of the discussion, they never failed to bring up the subject of the drowned man.

From sentence to sentence they came to mutual reproaches about this drowning business at Saint-Ouen, casting the crime in the face of one another.

They grew excited to the pitch of fury, until one felt like murdering the other.